Rudolf Bultmann

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884-1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg. He is one of the defining names in early twentieth-century biblical studies. A sharp critic of liberal theology, he faulted it for failing to take the mythical character of the texts seriously. His significance lies in proposing a way of reading the New Testament that looked for the existential meaning of faith rather than a historical reconstruction of Jesus' life.

He was born in Wiefelstede, in Oldenburg, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied theology at Tübingen, Berlin and Marburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1910 with a dissertation on the Letters of Paul under Johannes Weiss. After brief posts at Breslau and Giessen, he returned to Marburg as a full professor in 1921 and remained there until his retirement in 1951. His doctoral students included Hans Jonas, Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, Helmut Koester and Ernst Fuchs, and he also taught Hannah Arendt. He was close to Martin Heidegger, whose existentialist ideas shaped his thinking, though Bultmann insisted that the New Testament is not a doctrine about human nature but a proclamation of a liberating act of God.

His best-known early work, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921), examined how the gospel narratives were formed and concluded that reliable historical material about Jesus was hard to recover. He argued that what matters for faith is the kerygma, the proclamation of Christ, rather than the biographical details of the historical Jesus. To make this message intelligible to readers shaped by modern science, he proposed demythologizing: reading the mythological elements of the New Testament in existential terms and replacing supernatural explanations with temporal and existential categories. His 1941 lecture New Testament and Mythology set out this programme and provoked intense debate.

Under Nazism he opposed the regime on matters touching the church and the university. He did not denounce state antisemitism directly, but he rejected the Aryan paragraph, which excluded Christian clergy of Jewish ancestry, as incompatible with the essence of the church. He joined the Confessing Church, which resisted government efforts to merge Protestant churches into a single Reich Church.

His legacy is twofold. He brought the old quest for the historical Jesus to a close and opened a sceptical phase that shaped much of the twentieth century. At the same time, his pupil Käsemann reopened the question of the historical Jesus, while Fuchs and Ebeling built on his existentialist analysis to develop a new hermeneutics. He remains an essential reference for anyone studying the gospels and the relationship between faith and history.